A work to be completed over the rest of 2026.

Chapter 1.

On what he figured was an unremarkable day in the psychiatric ward of the Northern Hospital in Melbourne, a top Indian-Australian psychiatrist by the name of Dr Suresh Allam sat in an interview room with one Dr Charles Chang, a Chinese-Australian trainee psychiatrist, waiting for an African-Australian security guard by the name of Saul Tokodi to fetch a newly committed patient, a boyish Anglo-Australian punk with a weird name and a distinctive mohawk.

‘So,’ asked Allam, ‘did Pluto resist being treated?’

“Not physically,’ replied Chang. ‘But he was wary,
even paranoid about our most honourable work,
saying we care only about the pounds and bills
we can bleed from the corrupt drug companies,
not the empty, bleeding gums of the medicated
or the pounds they gain, getting them so down
they care naught about the sexual dysfunctions
that - ’

‘And how’s our new patient?’ interrupted Allam
as Tokodi and Pluto entered the room. ‘Salutary
is your treatment, says all the scientific research.
Abilify, far from being one of our typical old pills,
offers a breakthrough in benign psychiatric care
by activating, should the patient stay dedicated,
"a lovability in the employability and profitability
of stability", I'm hearing at all the fancy functions
I - ’ 

‘I feel hungover,’ said Pluto. “And I feel anxious.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Allam, ‘given your sorry situation
as a violent lawbreaker facing a prison sentence,
it’s your better angel and he sounds thunderous
because without your medication you were deaf.
You - ’

‘I’m no demon,’ said Pluto. “It’s you who’s scary,
not I, a bold and virtuous rebel. O like an angel,
upon seeing strange souls in the bog, in the fen
of conformity, I, knowing it to be dirty and dark,
courageously, through original acts of creation,
haul many out to a distant and eccentric haven
where everything is scintillating and wondrous
and free from the stupid, cowardly conformists
so keen on maintaining the plain and ordinary
they hate everything that smells of strangeness
and condemn it with a plastic authoritarian pen,
saying - ’

‘So you smoke marijuana, do you?” asked Chang.

To be continued.